Oh my how refreshing and yet depleting and hence motivating to read this and be reminded of the ridiculous structures humans tend to create to make themselves feel useful.
Reminds me of three related texts and in particular Stefano Harney’s work in “strategic management,” a kind of subversion of these bs bureacratic structures through autonomous and postcolonial organisational approaches.
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The University and the Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
This has become a prolific text among academics and activists and has induced the Undercommoning movement: “a network of radical organizers within, against, and beyond the (neo)liberal, (neo)colonial university.” Its success propelled Moten and Harney to write the series of essays that became the even more prolific _Undercommons: Fugtive Planning and Black Study._This thinking has heavily influenced my own research and I was lucky enough to spend some time in residency with Fred and Stefano back in 2016. One of the things I found super powerful was that they see the solution in the social and not the political. This is for many reasons outlined in their work but one that has stuck with me is because the political triages (sorts), and by doing this upholds power dynamics of valuation. Hence my ongoing hesitancy to focus on the political system as we broach solutions (as per some of our conversations @alberto) . -
State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality by Stefano Harney
This is an older work of Harney’s from 2002 where he reflects on his own time working in state bureaucratics.
“An innovative contribution to political theory, State Work examines the labor of government workers in North America. Arguing that this work needs to be theorized precisely because it is vital to the creation and persistence of the state, Stefano Harney draws on thinking from public administration and organizational sociology, as well as poststructuralist theory and performance studies, to launch a cultural studies of the state. Countering conceptions of the government and its employees as remote and inflexible, Harney uses the theory of mass intellectuality developed by Italian worker-theorists to illuminate the potential for genuine political progress inherent within state work…” -
Capitalist Sorcery (which I’ve actually listed as a possible text for our Econ Sci-Fi reading group as per the wiki here) and talks about how management turns people into minions. I also love the Micro-politics of Capital by Jason Read for that…